Gaunab

The moon goes dark over Great Namaqualand, and a hunting party that has walked two days toward the game turns around and goes home. Nobody argues. Somebody says what everyone is thinking, that Gaunab has got the better of them tonight, and the talk turns to war coming and people dying. The same was said when the southern lights showed, or when a comet dragged its tail across the sky.

His name begins with a click made at the side of the mouth, written ǁGaunab, and it comes from a root that means to destroy, to ruin, to wipe out. Among the Nama and the Korana, the herding peoples of the dry southwest of Africa, he was the one who did harm. Most of what survives about him was gathered by Theophilus Hahn, a missionary’s son who grew up speaking Nama and published what the old people told him in 1881, alongside reports from earlier travellers and mission men. It is a small file. It is also a consistent one.

The main story came to Hahn from a very old man of the ǁHabobe Nama, a great-grandfather who remembered the burning of the Warmbad mission station in 1811. In his telling, there was once a great chief, the first of the Khoikhoi, from whom every tribe descends. Another chief, Gaunab, kept killing his people in large numbers, so the first chief went to war with him. He lost. He fought again and lost again. But each defeat left him stronger than the one before, and at last he had grown so big and so strong that he ended the matter with a single blow behind Gaunab’s ear. Gaunab went down dying. On the way down he hit his killer once, on the knee. The winner limped for the rest of his days, and from then on people called him Tsui-Goab, which the old man understood as Sore Knee. So the god who sends the rain carries his enemy’s mark in his own name.

Other tellings change the furniture and keep the shape. A missionary named Ebner, writing in 1829 from among the people of Jager Afrikaner in southern Namaqualand, heard that Gaunab fought a wise old man who was too clever for him. The old man dug a deep pit, planted sharpened stakes in the bottom, called Gaunab out to fight beside it, and threw him in. The people killed a fat sheep to celebrate. Among the Korana, a missionary of fifty years’ standing reported the plainest version of all: Tsui-Goab lives in the red sky, Gaunab in the black sky, the two fought long ago, and the knee took the blow.

No one says where Gaunab came from. He has no parents and no birth. He is simply there, killing, when the story opens. Hahn, who knew the language well, noticed that the ordinary word for the ghosts of the dead was the same word in the plural. These ghosts left their graves on dark nights and came rattling up to the kraals with a noise like dry hides dragged over stones, and their idea of fun was to beat someone half to death. His reading was that Gaunab began as one of them, a mischief-making ghost who grew into the great destroyer. He also argued that the red sky and the black sky were dawn and night, and that the whole war was first a way of talking about the day. That part is Hahn’s own theory, of its time, and the people who told him the stories did not put it that way.

Nobody describes him. The tellings give him a dark heaven and nothing else to stand in. What he does have is a fire. An old Nama man told Hahn that his grandfather called the rainbow by the word for fire, and said that Gaunab kindles it, fools people into walking toward it, and that they die there. Oddly, the praying mantis carries the same name said in a different tone, where it means the one who shows luck, and nobody was allowed to kill it. One tone is the destroyer. The other is the best omen in the veld.

His power is death of a particular kind. People who died badly were said to have died the Gaunab death: the old left behind in a closed kraal with a little food and water, the executed, the enemy dead, anyone left unburied for the vultures and hyenas so that nothing of them remained. Their ghosts were his people, the people of the shadow. Mothers among the Korana told children to watch out for him because he could kill them. When thunder broke overhead, people shouted at the storm for him to get away, and some threw things at the lightning. Early missionaries heard all this and reached for the word they had ready, the devil, and the label stuck to him in print.

Yet near Walvis Bay and Sandwich Harbour, Hahn found a Nama group who prayed to him. They did not flatter him. They called him an evil-doer who killed them out hunting, and they prayed anyway, which is one way to deal with a neighbour like that.

His limits are written into every version. He is the one who loses. He can be outgrown, outwitted and dropped into a hole, and a patient enemy only gets stronger each time Gaunab beats him. He lives apart, in a heaven cut off from the good one. But the stories that kill him do not seem to have settled anything. He dies behind the ear in the old man’s tale, and he is still the name on people’s lips when the moon goes out.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Gaunab?

Gaunab is the destroyer in the beliefs of the Khoikhoi peoples of southern Africa, including the Nama and the Korana. He is linked with death, harm and bad omens and is the enemy of Tsui-Goab, the god who gives rain. His name, properly written ǁGaunab, comes from a root meaning to destroy.

What happened between Gaunab and Tsui-Goab?

Gaunab kept killing the people of a great Khoikhoi chief, so the chief went to war with him. The chief lost several fights but grew stronger each time, and finally killed Gaunab with one blow behind the ear. As Gaunab died he struck the chief on the knee, and the lame victor was known afterward as Tsui-Goab, understood as Sore Knee.

Where does Gaunab live?

Gaunab lives in a dark or black sky that is separate from the heaven of Tsui-Goab. The Korana said that Tsui-Goab lives in the red sky and Gaunab in the black sky. No telling describes the place further.

Is Gaunab the devil?

Gaunab is not the Christian devil, though early missionaries used that word for him. In Khoikhoi tellings he is a destroyer and a bringer of death, and the ordinary word for ghosts of the dead is the plural of his name. The devil label comes from mission writers of the 1700s and 1800s.

Did anyone worship Gaunab?

Most Khoikhoi feared Gaunab and cursed him during thunderstorms. Theophilus Hahn, writing in 1881, reported one Nama group near Walvis Bay and Sandwich Harbour who prayed to Gaunab even though they called him an evil-doer who killed them while hunting.

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